


Browser Beware

by orphan_account



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Crack, Gen, scifi, touches of hopefully humorously self-depricating horror?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-31
Updated: 2015-07-31
Packaged: 2018-04-12 05:03:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4466423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reeve spends a lot of time on the Internet. There are some rumors he cannot seem to escape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Browser Beware

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Licoriceallsorts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Licoriceallsorts/gifts).



> Prompt: Crackfic. Reeve's just heard a remake of their game is in the works. What changes would he like to see?
> 
> I must admit this is rather a new genre for me, but it was fun to write! I do hope it's enjoyable. Thank you for a prompt I would never have come to on my own thinking!

“A...remake?”

 

But of what?

 

He had seen the word over, and over, with increasing frequency in the last months. Remake, remake, remake. It struck a chord he wasn't sure he liked. After all. There was another refrain, distant and tinny though it had always been to him, but just as ominously familiar.

 

An unfortunate coincidence.

 

Surely.

 

But one to which he kept returning, on nights like this one. Or mornings, as both Yuffie, and his assistants would have insisted. 2 am and a vast expanse of window over an only recently well lit city, and his own, modest 'home laptop'. It was definitely his home laptop, because it had one of those timers on it; the kind that turned the screen-light from blue to a theoretically more relaxing orange when some world clock or other determined that the sun was beginning to set, and his eyes were beginning to strain.

 

Reeve, of course, used his 'home laptop' almost exclusively for work.

 

_Almost_ being the operative. He took breaks. He was under much too close scrutiny by his so-called adviser, and so-called assistants not to take breaks. And it was on one such break, at just such a low-lit 2am that the word had first come up.

 

The ubiquitous “Remake”.

 

And that was what had interested him, that it didn't actually seem connected to anything. Just a buzz that had started in the comments section of an ill-reputed periodical's forum, and slowly but surely, against all sense or odds, had...spread.

 

And Reeve, in his five minutes here to clear his mind, 3 minutes there to refresh a little, had followed the trail.

 

He had followed it from an absurd little comment on an absurd little website, to absurd little comments on much larger, more official ones, to what looked like an entire news ring with which he was not familiar, but which didn't ring...uncredible...

 

And there was, humming somewhere in the base of his skull, the awareness that these words did not read as easily as they should. They seemed blurry, in a way that was not like the jittering distraction of too much caffeine, or like the fog of not enough rest.

 

One particular low-lit 2am, when he was supposed to be approving budgets for a number of small-loan projects, particularly uninteresting ones, if he was forced to be honest, he found that his 5 minutes of letting the ...difficult...words slide into his brain had turned to fifteen, and he simply did not want to return to his work.

 

He did not re-open his workbook.

 

He clicked another link.

 

And then the uncanny of it all hit him. The way the word echoed like something he knew, and the brief mentioning of events that sounded familiar, and he had begun to search in earnest.

 

The Remake. Much awaited. In places, hardly believed.

 

He was almost starting to think...

 

But that was hardly possible.

 

How could one remake history? Especially a history of which so many hours and gil had gone to ensuring that many of it's details were obscured, or fabricated entirely?

 

Intelligence gathering was not his specialty. Not by far. But he had been Cait for long enough. He knew at the least, how to ask a question.

 

_What's the need?_

 

_The original cannot possibly be improved._

_What are you hoping for?_

 

_I just don't see how this would translate, but I am open to idea's. Anyone care to share a perspective on the economic reception of this remake, given general tensions in the region and floundering of large-production entertainment?_

 

Instead of answers he indeed, got history. Nearly accurate history at that. Except for...certain puzzling absurdities. Well that just wasn't right. Tifa was strong of course but no living human could suplex a literal train. Simple physics dictated that. But he had dim memories – perhaps in the heat of battle, or through some glitch in Caits perception.

 

But people could not lift trains.

 

4am, and Reeve sat back on his hands, eyes wide, not entirely sure he trusted himself to stand.

 

He had never given any thought to it but...

 

A link and a link and a link and a good four days of snack breaks and tea breaks and stretch breaks and a single, moderately untraceable message later later, and he found himself on a site that was new to him.

 

New, as in .net. What was that? He didn't recognize that lettering system. A part of the web most never saw, certainly. That wasn't strange. Strange was that he looked at these symbols, and he could swear, without knowing, that he _knew_.

 

_Not a Canyon dialect. Not even close. Was there something out of the Nibel region perhaps that he wasn't familiar with?_

 

 

 

A Remake? Of them? Some satire of the recent past, some profitable grab using names that...names that....

 

Well that theory was out. Almost no one knew the names of those who'd done the planet-saving, or even that it had actually happened. To most, Meteor was an unprecedented, but almost-natural catastrophe. Whoever as behind this, they _knew things._

 

It would be nearly two weeks before he could explore further.

 

He keyed in of course. Got alerts. Took a survey. The site, some word that meant lifestream, he knew, but how? He'd never seen these letters before. He wrote it off, though, as some psychological trick. Letters switched and font manipulated. Readible. Entirely readible. But meant to deter all but the most curious, on aesthetic.

 

That was at least, until he saw the 'trailer'.

 

Saw was perhaps not the right word. One did not 'see' something that left them shaken, and inspired, and terrified, on a level he could only think to describe as cellular.

 

Because he knew those forms but they were not knowable. He knew that particular metal in that particular deadly shape, and the way blonde hair fell with fluid motion – his brain nearly rebelled- what he was looking at was not real, was not possible.

 

And yet the more he looked the less he could recognize the differences. He could see how things were, and how he knew them, and...well that was that. He could look at the screen and let impossible details drown him, only to recognize at once a face, a place, with perfect clarity. He could look around his own rather square-dominated room, and read detail out of shapes he had never before seen as blocky.

 

Reeve had suspected he had found something new. He hadn't suspected this.

 

And, given the impossibility of all other possibilities, he had to confront this one. What he had found. This Remake. It was not of his world.

 

There were details off already; Dates that stood in argument, debatable names, whole sections of his own short history that could be skipped or altered.

 

As he read, lovingly detailed summaries and encyclopedic but sometimes criminally contradictory archives he found...

 

He looked at his own hands, and felt awe. They were the same round, but functional things they had always been. But if he stared. If he didn't blink. Yes! There not in the corner of his eye but the front of it. The anterior to his whole perception. There was the shadow of something infinitely delicate, and infinitely detailed, and it hurt his eyes to focus in just the right way, but his mind. His mind was there.

 

Indeed. He had found it. He had found somewhere else. Somewhere that brushed up to his where, blearily close. Whatever he was half-seeing, it existed, and it had some tie, however tenuous, to his own existence. To the people writing their theories, airing their hopes and their doubts and their ... wholly unnecessary fifty two cents on who Cloud would better spend his time with at the Golden Saucer, he was as peripherally real to them as they to him.

 

After a long moment, he sat up straight. He steepled intricate phalanges only to realize abruptly that he had, in fact, not. His two round hands had not changed. Brushing this off, Reeve stared into the orange-screen glow that was beginning to verge back into blue with the coming dawn.

 

There was possibility here. It might never reach the 'creator' but there was possibility. For an alternate history. An alternate reality. If not where he was, then somewhere. So many things. So many things could change. Could be made better.

 

He created a new email.

 

He fabricated an IP address.

 

He took the survey again.

 

Open world, definitely. He'd always taken those odd...barriers in space and time as an unfortunate but unquestionable reality, until the possibility they might in fact be barriers had been presented.

 

Greater integration with the 'compilation' as it seemed to be called. More oversight. A keener understanding of who and what they were dealing with, both at home and abroad as seemed to be afforded in the 'compilation'. Fewer civilian casualties.

 

He for one, should also like very much to have a less cumbersome vehicle for his creation. Cait was his star, truly. The fortune telling, that was necessary, but was the horn? A more effective way to deal damage could be found. Even a weaponized frisbee seemed more sensible to him, in hindsight.

 

And while he was at it...

 

Yes. The word. What was the word? He'd had it a moment ago.

 

Fingers. Right. Of course.

 

Reeve should like very much to have fingers, too.

 


End file.
